A Stranger's Kiss

him over her shoulder and patted his back gently. He promptly threw up. ‘Oh my poor darling. Mummy will take you home.’
    She groaned as she moved, her shirt sticking cold and wet to her back. Tara ran to get a towel from the bathroom and mopped up the worst of the damage.
    ‘There wasn’t much, but it seems to have gone rather a long way.’
    ‘I’m sorry,’ Jane apologised. ‘One day perhaps we can talk for more than five minutes without interruption.’ She stood up and gathered her belongings. ‘I must get home and change Charlie.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘And me. I’ll phone you.’
    Tara helped Jane down the steps with her bag, handing it over to the chauffeur of her silver Mercedes. Then she bolted for cover.
    The wild surge of emotion that swept over her as she leaned weakly against her front door was not pleasant. Anger at herself and at him. Fury at fate for conspiring with such glee to show her love, only to snatch it from her lips. Rage against a life that determined she should be on her own for ever.
    No. Not on her own. She flung herself across the room to pick up the local paper, searching almost frantically through the pages seeking the for sale columns.
    Pets. Retrievers, kittens, tropical fish. No lap dogs. Not even a pug. She began to cry, hot bitter tears that seemed never ending.
    Afterwards she washed her hair, spent a long time in the bath, painted her finger and toe nails a vivid defiant red, before wiping it off again.
    There was a comedy on the television. She switched it on and made a pretence of watching it. It made no sense to her, but another half an hour had gone by. She wondered idly how she had spent her time before she met Adam Blackmore. There had never seemed enough hours in the day, now every hour seemed like a week.
    Slowly she prepared for bed, pulling on the first thing that came to hand, an old nightdress, white with tiny pink flowers, a ruffle of lace at the throat and at the wrists, a deep frill to her toes at the hem. She brushed her hair until her arm ached. She would have it cut a little shorter, she decided, into one of those sleek bobs she had seen in a magazine. She’d had enough of hairpins. She would make an appointment first thing in the morning.
    And with that decision a determination to spring clean her life overtook her. She opened her wardrobe and began to drag out all the dull, boring clothes she wore to the office. She carried them into the kitchen and bundled them into a plastic sack. They could go to the charity shop in the morning. Never, she fervently avowed, would she wear grey again.
    Then, as she wondered what to do next tiredness suddenly overwhelmed her, a combination of her long drive and an excess of emotion. She checked the door and windows and settled herself in bed. Ten minutes later she was fast asleep.
    * * *
    Someone was pounding on a stake with a mallet and she wished they would stop. It was a long way off, but the noise dragged her relentlessly back to consciousness. For a long moment, on the brink between sleep and waking she thought she was dreaming. Then she sat up with a start. It was someone hammering at her door.
    She switched on the lamp and looked at her alarm clock. It was nearly two o’clock in the morning. Someone must need help. She threw off the bedclothes, dragged on a dressing gown and ran to the door where a sudden attack of self-preservation made her slide the chain across before she opened it a crack.
    ‘Tara, let me in!’ Adam slammed the door back against the chain.
    She fell back. ‘Go away, Adam. I don’t want to see you.’
    He didn’t bother to argue with her, he simply put his shoulder to the door and the wood splintered, the screws hanging on for a desperate moment before giving up the unequal struggle. The door burst open with a crash and Adam was standing in the opening, dark, angry, a day’s growth of beard on his face. Then he stepped into her tiny hall, filling it, overwhelming her with his presence and kicked the door shut behind him, without ever taking his eyes from her.
    ‘Where the hell have you been?’ he demanded.
    She wanted to run, but her legs wouldn’t obey her. Defiance was all that was left and she lifted her chin and hurled it at him. ‘It’s none of your business.’
    ‘Wrong, Tara. I’m making it my business.’ He moved swiftly and she backed nervously until the sofa was behind her knees and she had to stop or fall backwards across it. ‘Who were you with?’
    She